does giving birth make someone a mother?

I am meeting my birth mother today, I can't believe that it is here. It was just a week ago that I received a call from my brother Alex bluntly letting me now that the women that gave birth to me and that I have not seen in twenty years was coming here to Utah. Well the very first call came from Michelle Alex's wife, she said casually, hey Tina is coming to town in about a week and I didn't know if you wanted to see her or not and where you would want to meet? It took a minute for my mind to process what she just said, I couldn't believe what I had just heard and who I had heard it from. I was pretty upset at my brother for not asking me if it was ok for him to invite our birth mother here, I know that I do not own Utah but I do live here and it would of been nice to have some sort of say in the matter. I know that I want to meet her but I at least wanted that on my terms and for it to be my decision of when not someone else's. I just still can't believe that he did not talk with me first.

I have so many thoughts and emotions running through my mind and body that it is difficult to make sense of them. I guess I am anxious, stressed and angry at the moment. It all still feels surreal to me, my heart is pounding and I keep cry for no reason. I don't know why I am so upset I guess I am angry at Tina for not being there all these years. I am angry for not looking like my parents that raised me. I am angry for all the times that that I went to the doctor for check up and having babies and couldn't answer any question about my family and health background. I am angry because it was always hard to feel loved when your own mother choice drugs over you. I am angry for not having that bond with someone all through my adolescent years. I am angry for not being able to say, I must get that or this from my mother or that's why I do things this way, but mostly I am terrified that I even care about these things. I always seemed to suppress these feeling so well, but now they are all being forced out of me without my consent. How do you deal with something like this, Is there an easy fix? I guess not.

Facebook

I was on facebook one day just browsing through all the thoughts and random things that all my "friends" had posted when I noticed that I had a friend request form a girl named Jessica, whom I had never heard of or seen before but then I noticed that she was friends with my brother Jesse. So I decided that I would talk to him first and find out who she was before I let her be my "friend". A couple of days went by and I kind of forgot about it, until I received a phone call from Jesse asking if I had gotten a message from a girl Jessica on facebook. I asked him if he knew who she was and he said no and that he had accidentally pushed the accept friend. So I asked him what she wanted, he said that she knew our birth mother Tina and that she was a great person that had helped her out a lot and that our names had come up in conversation with Tina one day and so she was curious and looked our names up and there we were. She said that she wanted to contact us for Tina because she would never do it for herself. At first I was fine with everything, I was calm and collective. I called my sister and relayed all the information to her. She acted completely opposite, to say the least she was freaking out. I couldn't quite understand why her emotions were so different from mine. I thought it was funny at how crazy she was taking everything and then she was almost with out words and if you know my sister that comes rarely. After my sister and I were done talking I sent this girl Jessica a message asking if she was sure she had the right Tina, I gave her a few last names that she used to have and asked her to send a picture if she could. Jessica said that she was positive that it was the right Tina. She gave me her full name, phone number, and said that she had just created a facebook account. So I immediately looked her up and there she was a picture and everything. I then called my sister Amber and told her what had happened, so Amber promptly looked her up and as soon as she saw her picture she started she started to freak out again she said it was like seeing a ghost. I think my sister was a little more emotional then I was because she looked so much like her. I thought that it was kinda funny that she was taking it all so different and didn't understand why it was such a big deal.

Later that night I was finishing up a book that My friend Dee wrote about her life and all the hardships that she had to endure. I was reading about one of the times that she was in with a psychologist and he told her that it was amazing at how wonderful she had turned out and that most people that had gone through what she had usually ended up on the street as prostitute or into drugs or worse. As I read these words everything started hitting me, I was like that, I still can't believe that I tuned out half normal. My emotions then started taking over my body, I began shaking and crying. I was so confused I didn't know what was happening to me. I was fine before and now I was a complete and utter mess. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in contact with my mother. She was the one that abandoned my siblings and I and had let unthinkable things happen to us. I was feeling so clouded. Even though she was not the mother that she should of been I still felt a connection to her, a bond that only comes from being biologically related, and that scared me.

age:3

It was a hot sunny day in California as it always was. We lived in an old run down trailer park where we were all sardined in so tight. There was plus side to living in a place with so many other people, there we plenty of friends to play with. The day was only getting hotter by the minute so we were definitely in the need for a swim in our community pool (a blue plastic baby pool). We got the pool all cleaned and ready for the water and I started filling her up. Oh how excited my sister and the other girls were to get in and cool down. The water always seems to fill up so darn slow when you are just standing there watching it, but finally it was full. I backed up, put the hose down, and was the first to step into the cool refreshing water, when to my surprise all the girls started to scream. I looked down into the pool and saw that the water was quickly tuning bright red before my eyes. In all the excitement of getting into the pool I hadn't realized I had stepped on the base of an old broken coke bottle. We should of known better then to set up there considering it was were all the boys would bust their bottles against the wall, but the main building was the only place where there was a faucet and hose. The bottle went straight through the center of my foot and came right out. When it hit me what had just happened I started to scream and cry. My sister went and got my parents who were thankfully home, which was rare. My father strapped a belt to my leg as tight as he could and asked to borrow a neighbors vehicle. My parents and my sister all loaded in the big blue van with me on my mothers lap in the front seat with my leg hanging out the window. My father drove as fast as he could to get to the clinic but of course there was traffic along the way which made my father so very angry. He was blowing that horn, giving the finger and using quite a few choice words to try to get people to let us pass. Even though my father had tried to cut off the blood circulation in my leg with the belt the blood just never seemed to stop it was literally spewing out uncontrollably. We finally arrived at the clinic, I was laid upon a dirty table and the doctor asked if we had insurance but of course we had none so he said he would stitch me up the cheapest way he could. By this point I was feeling pretty weak from the blood loss that I was just lying there, but when that doctor stuck the stitching needle into the bottom of my foot I was definitely awakened. The doctor asked that everyone try to hold me down and keep me as still a possible while he sewed up the wound. Im not sure how clean that needle was or if the doctor was really a doctor but I will never forget how painful it was.

So I wanted to start this blog mostly for myself. I want to use this as a journal and take the opportunity to write down and share those experiences that have made me stronger and those that have made me weaker. These memories will not necessarily be in chronological order, I will just write what comes to me. Some of these experiences will be happy ones but most of them will be negative ones. I hope that I will be able to connect with those reading and show that you do not have to be a statistic and there can always be a happy ending if you truly want it.